Four days. We have four days to solidify our plan to confront Kimela and get some answers—maybe all the answers. I’m still placing my bets on Minister Kobok’s involvement, but I can’t deny that Kimela has the most tangible reason to want to get Tamsin out of the picture, and I can’t forget the sly way she insulted my country and my folk at the Bakkonso Ball. I think of the way Lark stepped up in my stage a few weeks ago, how she filled the little space, menacing with purpose, and how I babbled like an idiot when faced with the point of her knife. I have no doubt that Kimela, when faced with the same threat, will give us whatever information she knows—and as she’s the new ashoki, I’m hoping it will be a lot.
The big thing will be making sure any guards are detained long enough to let Lark and Tamsin get in the coach. So the day after our foray into Giantess, Lark and I ride out to the road leading into town. She’s wearing one of her new work shirts, but none of the other purchases—we both agreed they’d be too conspicuous if seen by a passerby, and we need to keep her involvement secret until the day of the attack. If word gets out that the Sunshield Bandit has been spotted outside Giantess, Kimela might change her route altogether and spoil everything.
It’s a thrill riding through the countryside with Lark, weighing the merits of various terrain and landmarks. For two days, we poke among outcroppings and weave through redwood stands, fluffing up duff and debating hiding places and escape routes. She clambers into embankments and has me ride by, studying the angle of travel and the confines of the space. She rides ahead with instructions for me to wait ten minutes, then follow and try to pick out her hiding place. It’s rough, satisfying work, and we arrive back at Soe’s exhausted but grimly satisfied with our decisions.
Lark doesn’t stop to rest once we’re back at the cabin, though. She goes right back to teaching Tamsin sign language in between whittling little blocks for their resin letter stamps. Tamsin still seems determined to write out her essay using her co-opted screw press, and none of us are brave enough to contradict her. While we sit in the kitchen—Lark in the corner in a pile of wood shavings—Tamsin bends over the grooved wooden plate, painstakingly sliding letters into the grooves with her lips pursed in concentration. It makes my head spin to watch her—she has to compose each word backward, and near the bottom all her sentences are full of gaps where she and Lark haven’t finished making enough stamps. At the end of each day she gives Lark a list of the letters she needs, and Lark obligingly uses her bootleg branding-iron technique to cast more in the sand.
I’m hoping that perhaps the novelty of seeing all those letters printed in neat, even rows will work in our favor. We’re all getting better at recognizing Tamsin’s most frequent hand signs, but without her voice, our plan hinges on Kimela taking the time to read the essay in full. The lines of stamps—more crisp and compact than a woodblock, more precise than handwriting—might not be fast, but they’re certainly different. The fragments that Tamsin has managed to get out of one of the small presses—the big one being reclaimed for pressing the goods from town—are so unusual in appearance, it may be just the extra hook we need to keep Kimela’s attention.
On the third day, Soe goes into town with her newly pressed goods. We spend the day around the cabin, hashing out the finer details of our plan. I’m halfway concerned that she’ll return with word that there are bounties up for Iano and me, or that soldiers have poured in on the report of that woman with the twisted eyelid who shadowed me on market day. But Soe returns with news that everything seems normal. From her cart she hands Tamsin a giant stack of rag paper, more than she could possibly need, and to Lark she hands a burly, fullered sword with a squat hilt.
“That’s the only thing he had that matched your specifications,” Soe explains as Lark tests its balance. “He offered to forge something more to my liking, but I told him this one would do.”
“It’ll do,” Lark confirms, giving it an experimental swing.
To me, she hands over a long, toothed crosscut saw and several wedges, the kind my ma has her scouts and sawyers use for timbering. I handle them as if they were relics. Never have I been allowed to help fell or buck a tree, whether it’s an infested pine to be taken down or a timber oak bound for the Paroan shipyards. Now that I think on it, examining the teeth of the saw, I don’t know why. These saws are meant for two people to operate, so if I were to collapse on the spot, my partner would know right away. I’m hardly going to lie around unconscious while trees fall without anyone knowing. Felling, limbing, bucking, hewing . . . they’re all inherently dangerous jobs anyway. There’s an endless well of tragic tales, some true, some not, that scouts tell around their fires about deadly mishaps brought on by a hatchet or a handsaw.
I turn the wedges in my hands, suddenly stung by a sense of injustice. Why should my parents, after all, keep me from such a task? Why should they keep me from any of it? Mama knew how much I longed to be in the woods. I begged, I pleaded, I tried every treatment she researched and several more I unearthed myself for slowing or stalling my seizures. Anything for the chance to earn my florets, the first and most basic badge signaling the transition from trainee to scout. Instead, I was kept back, kept inside, kept in bed, while my mother leaned over me, her own silver florets worn from their decades on her uniform collar.
I close my hands on the wedges. I’m done letting my parents’ overcaution keep me from the things they always warned me against. I’ve already proved I can travel cross-country, even if I did collapse twice along the way. I even dug a seep and revived Lark. Why should I be any more afraid of timbering, or ladders, or walkwires?
I ignore the tiny voice in my head, speaking incongruously in my older brother’s voice, reminding me of how I nearly fell apart when Lark collapsed in the water scrape.
Shut up, Vynce, I think furiously. You’re just worried I’ll finally beat you at something.
So, on day four, Lark and I take the mules and cart back out to the place she’s chosen to stage the attack. We’ve been calling it that—the attack—but we’re hoping the landscape will do most of the work for us. After crawling over nearly every inch of road and bank for three-quarters of a mile, Lark has picked the spot. It’s a hairpin curve set into a steep slope, hemmed in by dense bracken and redwoods. On one side, the bank rises up toward a squat summit; on the other, it falls sickeningly into a deep ravine, so choked with sword ferns and sorrel that the stream at the bottom is apparent only by the distant chatter of invisible water. Any coach team is going to take their time going around this bend, and, most useful to us, it’s impossible to see around it.
“Okay,” Lark says, standing hip-deep in bracken on the uphill embankment, surveying the road. “The coach comes in on the straightaway. Tamsin said she usually traveled with three guards—one on the coach, one in front, and one behind—plus her maid.”
I nod eagerly. The main subject of our kitchen discussions for the last three days has been how to get as many guards as possible away from the coach and held up. Iano had suggested he simply step into the road and give the royal order to stop, but Tamsin reminded him of how we’re still unsure if his mother had a hand in the attack on her stage, meaning we have no way of knowing what the palace guards’ orders might be should they encounter him. I offered a series of attack formations, moving our little group around in an array of swords and crossbows, with Rat thrown in. Iano got hot and bothered, and was arguing against any injury to royal guards when Lark finally cut in and offered her simple, elegant solution.
“The coach stops,” Lark continues, stepping back onto the road and striding toward the hairpin. “A guard rides forward to check the way.” She rounds the blind curve, ducking around ferns hanging into the road. She stops. “And then they see the tree.”
“And there’s a lot of swearing,” I say.
She nods, looking from the empty road up to the redwoods reaching to the sky. “It’s too steep and narrow for the coach to turn around. The guards will get out their tools—if we’re lucky, they’ll only have hatchets, but in this terrain they’ll probably at least have a bow saw—and they’ll get to work clearing the tree while the coach waits.”
“The curve will hide us, and the noise from sawing should cover our sound,” I say.
“Again, if we’re lucky,” Lark says, staring darkly at the road. “Chances are high they’ll leave at least one guard with the coach, and if Kimela or her maid screams, the others might hear over the noise of their saws. That’s where the rest of you come in.”
I nod again excitedly. We’ve parceled out the weapons we have among us—Soe with her crossbow, Lark with her knife and broadsword, Iano with his rapier . . . and me with his longbow. He’d reluctantly handed it over yesterday, and I’ve been practicing with it since then. I was surprised—it’s not nearly as hard to draw as I thought it might be. My folk use shorter flatbows, and I’d failed to realize that my ma’s stubby hedge-apple bow is ten times stiffer than Iano’s willowy yew bow. I’m hardly the archer my sister Ida is, but after a day of practice, I’m at least hitting the target as many times as I’m missing it.
“You’ll stay upslope, and Soe will be down the road,” Lark says, looking up the bank again. “That way you can snipe from the trees if you need to. You’ll be at that rock we found, so you can see around both sides of the bend and use those birdcalls you taught us to keep everyone coordinated.”
My excitement spikes. This was my best idea—using the scouts’ long-distance whistles to run our attack. I’ve been practicing them since I first learned to whistle, tiptoeing around our family’s wing at Lampyrinae and letting them ring out when things got too quiet. When I got older, I was able to use the excuse that I was helping Vynce practice them for his rise through the Guard ranks, but in reality it was so I could internalize what little scout culture I had access to.
It only makes sense to use them now. Golden-crowned sparrow for a warning. Cardinal for all clear. Goldfinch for location. Towhee for aid. We’ve added a few more to suit the needs of our plan. Soe’s cabin had rung with experimental whistles and chirps as I’d taught them to the others, making Rat finally slink out of the kitchen with his ears back.
Lark goes to the edge of the narrow road, looking down into the steep-sided ravine. “Iano and I will detain any guards that hang back. When we’re sure they’re secure, Tamsin and I will get into the coach with Kimela. I’ll help her say her piece, and then we’ll hand Kimela the essay. If she seems ready to ally with us, she can have her guards stand down, and we’ll all have a long chat. If she doesn’t . . .”
This has been a sticking point for us—what to do if Kimela isn’t swayed by Tamsin’s appearance and composition, or what to do if she just caves and gives us a confession right away. Would the guards follow Iano’s orders if it turns out that Kimela has been our enemy? Or will they attempt to fight their prince?
We tossed around the idea of trying to take Kimela away with us, but none of us liked that plan. Lark pointed out that the guards would be after us like a shot, while Soe pointed out that we had nowhere secret or secure to keep her prisoner. In the end, Tamsin convinced us all to simply retreat, making sure we all got away in one piece, so we could make a new plan with the information we had gathered. To me, it seems like a loose end, a place where our plan simply stops. But Lark agreed, insisting that we need to be more focused on our safety than doing anything too rash.
“All right,” she says, scuffing a few rocks experimentally with her boot. “We’ve covered everything we can think of.” She nods to the cart, where the crosscut saw and wedges are. “Ready for the hard bit?”
“Ready,” I say.
“Are you sure?” she presses. “You know what this means, don’t you?”
“’Course,” I say with forced indifference, reaching into the cart for the canvas-wrapped saw.
But when we’ve struggled up the steep bank and reached our selected tree, I hesitate. The redwoods here are small for their kind, practically tiny compared to ancients like Giantess. But their trunks are still three feet across, strong and healthy, their roots weaving through the soil to hold this hillside together. I check to make sure Lark is occupied around the far side of the tree, and then I rest my palm on its bark.
Mama has seeded a deep culture of forest conservation in the Silverwood, though she argues against folk who say so. She counters that she didn’t start it at all—that it’s always been in the blood of our folk to protect our forests the best ways we know how, and that she simply codified it again after the bad practices employed by my grandfather. I’ve seen the scars on the landscape from overharvesting and unchecked pests and disease. I’ve seen the barren hillsides, burned right down into the soil by roaring wildfires that raced across the ridges where scout-controlled burns had been neglected. The Silverwood’s legendary forests are a joint product of both forestry and deep respect, and nowhere is that more evident than my ma’s eye on the mountains.
Rule number one—don’t cut anything without a good reason.
Fire management and pest control are good reasons.
I’m not so sure staging a bandit attack is.
I run my fingers over the crevices in the cinnamon-colored bark. I wonder how old this tree is, what creatures call it home, what it’s seen, what it’s survived.
I’m going to kill it.
Lark comes around the other side before I can pull my hand away. She pauses.
“We can try to think of another way,” she says.
I shake my head. “No, we’ve made our plan. The only other possibility is a full-on attack—better to cut down one tree than have one of us get hurt.”
“We could call it off,” she says lightly. “There’s still time. We could see if she’d meet with us once she gets into town.”
I lift my eyebrow at her, forcing bravado. “Is the Sunshield Bandit arguing for diplomacy over an ambush?”
“Yeah, the Sunshield Bandit just might be,” she says with an edge. “It never hurts to think twice about these things.”
I sigh. “I’ve thought a lot more than twice, and I know you have, too. If we were sure Kimela wasn’t behind the blackmail, maybe we could meet with her in Giantess. But if she is, the lot of us waltzing right into her entourage would put Tamsin exactly where she’d want her. It would put all of us exactly where she’d want us. This way at least there’s a chance to get away.” I look up at our doomed tree, trying to push away my guilt. At least it will die for a cause. “Have you ever done this before?”
“Not on anything this big,” she says.
“The hard part’s going to be knowing when to stop so it doesn’t fall until tomorrow—we don’t want somebody else coming along and clearing it away.” I roll up my sleeves and start to unwrap the saw. With some reluctance, Lark unrolls the wedges, ax, and sledgehammer. When all our tools are in order and there’s no more stalling to be had, I pick up one end of the saw. Lark takes up the other end, but she doesn’t move toward the trunk with me.
“You sure?” she says again.
My irritation—and guilt—flare. “Yes, Lark, I’m sure. I know you think I rush headlong into everything, but I’ve actually thought this one through.” I try to shift toward the trunk. “Anyway, what’s made you so sentimental about one bitty redwood all of a sudden?”
“I just know you’d probably like to not kill this tree,” she says shortly, not giving in to my tugging. “And I’m telling you we can find another way.”
“No, we can’t! Not one that makes sense, anyway. Quit trying to talk me out of it.”
“I just want you to think . . .”
“I am thinking! I did think!” I jerk the saw handle in my fists. “And how come suddenly I have to be all careful and reasonable, when you’ve crashed a dozen-odd coaches? Did you hem and haw before you turned over Professor Colm’s stage?”
“Is that what this is all about?” she asks quietly, still holding the other end of the saw loosely at her waist. “Getting to play outlaw for a while, like there are no consequences attached?”
“I just want to do something that’s going to make a difference,” I say hotly. “And you suddenly feeling bad about stuff you’ve done isn’t going to stop me.”
As soon as I say the words, I wish I hadn’t. She stares at me, her face tense and guarded—almost sad. She doesn’t look like Eloise, or Rou, just now. She looks more like Queen Mona than ever. The cold, steely stare is familiar, but . . . I hadn’t been expecting the sadness.
I almost say something to walk back my callous words, but before I can, she steps up to the tree. Adjusting her grip on the saw handle, she places its teeth against the rippled bark and pulls. I stagger as the saw moves. With a long, raw scrape, the metal makes the first bite into wood.
I straighten and set my footing, and then haul the saw back toward me. Within a few pulls, we settle into a stiff, silent rhythm, the only sound the fitful whrzz, whrzz of teeth slicing through living wood.